June Films Update 3

Ten more films I watched.

1. The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies

At the end of The Desolation Of Smaug, the dwarves had got into the mountain and driven the dragon Smaug out. Smaug attacks Laketown, burns it, but is shot down by Bard, who becomes the new leader of the Laketown people. With the dragon gone, they head up towards the mountain, to take shelter in the ruined city of Dale. The dwarves decide to barricade themselves into the mountain.

Meanwhile Gandalf is rescued, the elves and wizards drive off the Nazgûl and Suaron, though they know they will rise again elsewhere. One orc army has already gone to attack the mountain, and Legolas and Tauriel track a second one coming. Meanwhile the elf army from Mirkwood comes to Dale, seeking gems that they failed to get a promise of from Thorin and the dwarves.

The elves and the men confront Thorin at the gates of the Lonely Mountain. The Laketowners need supplies, though money might help and Thorin promised them gold. The Elves have arrived and want the gems, with slightly less justice, but they also helped the men of Dale, so it’s not unfair for them to get a share. Gandalf also arrives, tries to negotiate. It doesn’t work. Thorin has been overcome by greed and pride, the gold and the mountain going to his head. He won’t let them in, he won’t give them what they want.

Bilbo has got the king-gem, the Arkenstone, and he sneaks it out of the mountain, hoping that offering this to Thorin will make him see reason. It doesn’t, and an army of dwarves led by Thorin’s cousin arrives. A battle begins, but then they are interrupted by the orcs (very poor timing) and the Dwarves, Men and Elves combine to fight this new threat. Thorin realises his mistake, overcomes the gold-fever and heads out for a set of escalating spectacular battle setpieces.

The film is full of spectacular battle setpieces and it’s good at them. The geography was established previously, and shown again numerous times. We are always located, and when we’re taken by surprise it’s not that someone spawned onto the middle of the field, but that we weren’t looking there. It’s well choreographed.

In the book Bilbo gets knocked out early in the battle and has it reported to him later, so no riding pig, riding moose, riding war goats, no ruined towers collapsing fights, no frozen river battles. If the film doesn’t do justice to the book, then turn about is fair play; this battle is rather cursorily dealt with in the book.

Watch This: Five armies have a battle
Don’t Watch This: The free peoples of Middle Earth absolutely cannot combine despite their best efforts until orcs turn up then they behave like a well-drilled military machine

2. Carry On Matron

At Finisham Maternity Hospital there are a variety of wacky characters. Sir Bernard Cutting (Kenneth Williams), registrar, is a hypochondriac. Dr Prodd (Terry Scott) a womaniser, verging on gross misconduct in his relationships with nurses and patients. In the absence of leadership from Sir Bernard, Matron (Hattie Jacques) tries to keep Prodd under control, and also all the various wacky expectant mothers and nervous fathers, plus sassy nurse Susan Ball (Barbara Windsor). Eccentric psychiatrist Dr Goode (Charles Hawtrey) turns out to be a friend of Matron, offers bad advice whenever the plot starts to falter.

That plot? Sid Carter (Sid James) heads up a criminal gang. Somewhere in the hospital they keep contraceptive pills and he intends to steal them and sell them abroad where they don’t have them. His initial efforts getting nowhere he convinces his son Cyril (Kenneth Cope) to disguise himself as a (female) nurse and locate them. Thinking Cyril’s a new nurse Dr Prodd invites her to his room, which Cyril accepts, wanting his plan of the hospital. As Prodd tries to grope Cyril they are interrupted to go out to assist movie star Jane Darling. In the ambulance Prodd is knocked out leaving Cyril to deliver triplets to great publicity.

Having worked through a variety of ailments, Sir Bernard thinks he might be changing sex. Consulting Dr Goode, Goode suggests that instead he is rather discovering his masculine urges for the first time, having previously subsumed them in his career. Sir Bernard decides he is in love with Matron and pursues her, leading to inevitable confusion and misunderstanding. Cyril is sent back in, and finds himself roommates with Nurse Ball. After some clothes changing and Ball explaining that because it’s hot she sleeps "in the raw", she figures out Cyril is a bloke, falls in love and keeps his secret, thus leaving space for a final, farcical attempt to steal the pills.

A strong setting for double entendres, as well as inappropriate romance (or sex pests) helps the film find some comedy. The side characters of Mrs Tidey (Joan Sims) who is enjoying the bed rest and large meals, and keeps having false alarms for giving birth, and her husband Mr Tidey (Kenneth Connor), a railwayman obsessed with punctuality, are pretty good. Sir Bernard’s hypochondria is tedious, and his attempts to woo Matron barely less so. Inserting a cross-dressing heist into the sitcom bawdy hospital does lift it, keeping things moving.

Watch This: A late period Carry On film, slightly better material than some
Don’t Watch This: A late period Carry On film, limply working through the expected scenes

3. Panic In Year Zero

The Baldwin family, husband, wife, teen son and daughter, make an early getaway to go on holiday with their caravan. This is lucky as their hometown of Los Angeles suffers a nuclear attack.

There’s a lot of confusion, and the wife wants to turn back to look for her mother. Instead the husband chooses to go on and buy up lots of supplies from just-opening shops in the next town. The gun shop owner won’t give him the guns due to their attempt to pay by cheque (hoarding the money). They take the guns by force, promising to return and pay. Later when trying to refuel the gas station owner has raised prices, so they attack again, and later have to see off three hoodlums.

Mr Baldwin explains his political theory, which he believes is a law of human nature. Until the government can come back and restore order it’s every man for himself, and so he intends to take the family to a remote cave they discovered on a camping trip and wait it out. The film takes his side, as small towns barricade themselves from refugees, perhaps unhappy with gun store and gas station robberies. Something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There’s some rather confused stuff on the radio, including the remnants of the UN declaring this Year Zero. I don’t know about that. In an odd twist of fate the gun store owner and wife are camping nearby. Unfortunately the hoodlums are also in the area; alerted to their presence by some washing escaping downstream they murder the gunstore owner and wife and rape the daughter before Mrs Baldwin scares them off with a rifle. Father and son then hunt them down and kill two of them, rescuing a kidnapped girl. The final hoodlum attacks and is killed while the son is injured; looking for medical help they encounter the army, who are finally re-asserting control. The radio announced the enemy has asked for a truce and the army approve of the Baldwin’s actions in hiding in the mountains as they escaped radiation sickness.

As you might guess I’m unimpressed with this film’s nakedly selfish message. Survival is the first duty until help comes, and you must violently pursue it. Where does the help come from? That’s someone else’s problem. Baldwin never thinks to volunteer to help, to offer assistance, to assume authority over a group larger than his immediate (nuclear) family. He makes no effort to mitigate the disaster and improve the situation himself. And the film agrees this was the right choice, indeed the small towns turning away refugees make it no choice at all.

Watch This: Paranoid nuclear attack thriller
Don’t Watch This: Asserts explicitly bad political opinions as inevitable

4. The League Of Gentlemen (1960)

Lieutenant-Colonel Hyde mails a crime novel, several halves of five pound notes and an invitation to lunch at the Café Royal to several former army officers. We are introduced to them, all in reduced, difficult, or humiliating circumstances. When they come to lunch Hyde offers them the remaining halves of the money, asks them their opinion of the book, to lukewarm response. He reveals that it has inspired him to make a plan to rob a bank, and also that he knows how all of them worked some sort of scam, crime, or scandal* in the army (as he had the files in his last billet at the War Office).

Eventually they agree, firstly posing as an amateur dramatics group, later moving into Hyde’s house, under military discipline. Their first mission is a raid on an army depot, where they distract everyone with a surprise inspection of the food, claiming that one of the soldiers complained. With everyone’s attention away, the others steal guns.

The plan involves precision timing. A large amount of money arrives at a London bank. The vault is impenetrable, as is the armoured car. However if they attack while it’s being transported through the bank – with guns, smoke bombs and radio jammers – they might get away with a million pounds. There’s a few worries – while working on the vehicles for the raid they’re disturbed by a policeman, who is pleased to see the abandoned warehouse in use, and make a note to keep an eye on it for them.

A classic crime thriller, with moments of real tension. Also a lot of humour, especially the opening sequence where we see how each of them is living, how leaving the army has left them variously high and dry. The end, when they are attempting to finish up their celebration and make their exit, only to be interrupted by an old Army buddy and new neighbour of Hyde is also entertaining, as they try to distract him from the frankly odd way the party wraps up.

Watch This: Excellent bank robbery, lifted at every stage by military stuff, humour or just an edge of things going off-plan
Don’t Watch This: Tired, old-fashioned jokes, reaching for farce when it might have answered questions on what those who excelled in war-time might do in peace

* One of them is gay, sufficient to have him both drummed out the army and have him being blackmailed by the police

5. Battle Royale

In near future Japan a recession has led to an authoritarian government that decides to crackdown on juvenile delinquency. As might be expected they choose an especially ineffective yet high profile method; they send randomly chosen (or not) classes of teenage school children to fight to the death until there is only one survivor.

Is it random? The class chosen has a kid whose father committed suicide, and one who stabbed his teacher. Arriving at the location, an island, that teacher, now recovered, briefs them. They have three days. They have explosive collars that will kill them if they go in a forbidden zone, more zones appearing as time goes on. They’re given a bag with rations, water, a map, supplies and a random weapon, some of which are not weapons.

Their teacher kills two kids during the briefing. There are a couple of students transferred in, having been in other Battle Royales, one who wants to kill, the other seeking revenge, maybe, for his girlfriend, who killed herself to let him win.

Several students kill themselves rather than fight. Some of them get access to a computer and hack the system. The ending gets complicated and a bit confused.

A brutal, occasionally blackly funny dystopia. The adult hatred for the young is what fuels it, running through it.

Watch This: Violent exploration of being forced into meaningless violence
Don’t Watch This: Violence for violence sake

6. Batman Begins

Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), in prison in Bhutan, fights the inmates, meets a mysterious man called Ducard (Liam Neeson). Ducard has him released, suggests if he wants to fight crime there’s a better way, invites him to a mysterious monastery at the top of a mountain, led by Ras Al’Ghul. There he’s trained in ninjitsu, and the philosophy of the League Of Shadows; that deception, theatricality and invisibility can multiply the abilities of a man; and that corruption and decadence are destroying the world and it must be returned to harmony. Wayne explains his backstory.

Only son to Thomas and Martha Wayne, scions of the rich and powerful Wayne family, he fell down a well and was scared by bats. Later at a performance of Die Fledermaus, he’s scared again and wants to leave; outside in the alley Thomas and Martha are mugged and killed. Bruce is brought up by the butler, Alfred (Michael Caine). Later the killer, Joe Chill, is offered parole in return for testimony against Carmine Falcone, the mob boss. Bruce intends to kill Chill but a Falcone hitman (hitwoman) gets him first. Bruce’s lawyer friend Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes) realises that the judge set it up; Gotham City is corrupt from top to bottom. Bruce goes to confront Falcone who is unimpressed, telling him to go back to his wealthy world because he can’t understand the underworld and so will always fear it. Bruce changes coats with a homeless man, dumps his wallet and ID and stows away on a ship to wander the world as a criminal, eventually ending up in the prison at the start.

Ducard makes some rather dubious assertions, blaming Thomas for Bruce’s parents death, and also taking credit for the depression that wrecked Gotham, and that Thomas used the family fortune to alleviate by building an elevated railway, hoping other wealthy and powerful people would follow suit. It sort of worked, as their deaths shocked them into trying to help. As the final stage of his initiation Bruce must kill a man accused of murder, the League Of Shadows being the court of final judgment when the judges and police are too corrupt. Bruce refuses, destroys the monastery, saves Ducard, leaves him and goes home to Gotham, intending to fight crime with Alfred’s help.

He finds himself in the middle of several plots. He connects with honest policeman Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) and attempts to disrupt Falcone’s drug smuggling operation. There’s more going on; some of the shipments go to Dr Jonathan Crane, head of Arkham Asylum, Gotham’s notorious hospital for the criminally insane. Rachel Dawes, now an assistant district attorney, has runs ins with him, as he keeps declaring Falcone’s mobsters criminally incompetent. Meanwhile Wayne Enterprises is being taken public by CEO William Earle (Rutger Hauer); Bruce meets with head of Applied Sciences Division Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) who supplies him with gadgets.

Bruce Wayne takes on the persona of the Batman, to try and defeat the mob, and root out corruption. But the League Of Shadows have not given up on their plan to destroy Gotham and bring the world back to harmony.

An attempt at a more grounded and realistic Batman, it’s still somewhat zany as a thriller. Ninjas! Ancient secret societies! Stealth tanks! Fear gas! Millionaire playboys buying hotels! Not quite as dark and gritty as I remembered, Batman’s taste for the dramatic has flair and humour to it. Some of the action scenes are first rate, the various villains have real menace and even the wackiest of scenes have some strength to them thanks to the cast (probably the direction too – Nolan is very intentional in everything he does).

Watch This: Superb superhero film, taking the premise seriously, while putting a new spin on it
Don’t Watch This: Despite the best efforts quite silly, and made brooding Batman (and other superheroes) a staple

7. Jaws: The Revenge

Amity Island police chief Martin Brody has died, not of a shark attack. His widow Ellen and son Sean, now a police officer, still live there, Sean engaged to Tiffany. Just before Christmas Sean goes out in the police boat to clear some debris from a buoy; a shark kills him.

The other son, Michael, his wife Carla and five-year old daughter Thea come back for the funeral. He’s working as a marine biologist in the Bahamas; Ellen begs him to stop but he won’t, he needs to finish the work to justify the grant and get his doctorate and after all the water is too warm for Great White Sharks. They suggest she comes down, get away, spend some time with her grand daughter and she does. Their pilot Hoagie (Michael Caine) shows some interest in Ellen; as the film progresses they go on a couple of dates to the surprise and dismay of Michael, who knows Hoagie is an old rogue.

Michael and his partner Jake continue with their work, tracking conch snails, when they encounter a Great White Shark. Jake wants to track it, as Great Whites normally avoid the Bahamas and Michael reluctantly agrees. They keep it secret though, partly because Ellen in having nightmares about sharks.

Inevitably the shark makes itself known, at the unveiling of Carla’s sculpture, nearly getting Thea, killing a friend’s mother. Ellen is convinced they are cursed, takes the boat out to kill the shark, Michael and Hoagie following by plane for a final, inevitable, deep-sea finale.

This is reviled as a terrible film, and I have some sympathy for that; the effects aren’t good, the plot convoluted, contrived and almost irrelevant anyway. After two or three films* the characters are genre-savvy; indeed Ellen being convinced that they are cursed** requires it. Yet they go out and do the foolish things that people in Jaws films do anyway. A mediocre sequel of a series that has been seeking the high of the first from the start.

Watch This: Silly shark attack film
Don’t Watch This: Silly shark attack film

* This film does not make sense as a sequel to Jaws 3D

** Just to say, I’ve seen more than one person assert that the film’s “explanation” for the shark attacks is “voodoo.” Michael uses the word “voodoo,” to dismiss a supernatural explanation. His use of the word to mean ridiculous superstition does perhaps show the level of the film’s engagement with Bahamian culture; Jake the major black Bahamian character is played by American actor Mario Van Peebles, his wife Louisa by American Lynn Whitfield

8. Citizen Kane

In the abandoned palatial mansion Xanadu in Florida, Charles Foster Kane dies, dropping a snow globe, gasping out the word “Rosebud.” We’re treated to a newsreel of highlights of his life as a newspaper owner. But the producer thinks there’s something missing, and sends out Thompson to try and find it, and to track down the meaning of the word Rosebud.

Thompson goes to try and visit Kane’s second wife; she’s an alcoholic nightclub owner and doesn’t speak. He goes to the archives of the banker Thatcher, where the written record tells of how Kane’s mother signed over a gold deposit in Colorado to be held in trust for Kane. By the time Kane comes of age Thatcher has built a vast financial empire for Kane, most of which he is uninterested in. He does take over as the publisher of the newspaper the New York Inquirer, starting a publishing empire. He seeks to publish scandal and shock, and also attacks business interests to the dismay of Thatcher; classic yellow journalism.

Thompson moves on, talking to more of his friends and colleagues, how Kane's political ambitions ended because of scandal, leading to his second marriage. Kane, of course, wanted to be loved, and he also wanted to control, and between those two things everything fell apart. There are some good touches; his second wife is described as a singer in the press so he builds her an opera house in Chicago. But she’s not good. When his friend, the music critic, tries to write an honest review, he drinks himself into a stupor, so Kane finishes it for him, then fires him with a big cheque.

Almost every innovation in film-making from this film has been used since, and sometimes perfected. The biographical approach is a classic. A problem with a classic – a seminal classic – is that all the best parts are familiar. And what’s new to me is the old-fashioned feeling bits, the slightly stilted, mannered sections. In the end, still enjoyable as a film, and even more so as a piece of film history.

Watch This: Classic film of rise and fall, love, America and hubris
Don’t Watch This: All the best ideas have been plundered by later films

9. The Fourth War

Colonel Jack Knowles (Roy Schnieder) was a distinguished soldier in Vietnam but has been a loose cannon as a peace time soldier. Now in the 1980s his friend General Hackworth has got him a command on the West German-Czechoslovakian border. On his first scout someone tries to cross from the other side and is killed, the Soviet Colonel Valachev (Jürgen Prochnow) seeming to taunt him.

Drunk on his birthday, told to keep his nose clean, he decides to sneak across the border, where he disables a detector, then holds the soldiers who come to investigate at gunpoint, force them to sing happy birthday before escaping. Valachev responds with sneaky border incursions, events escalating. Valachev was in Afghanistan, his career a mirror image of Knowles.

A rather silly film of frustration and a personal feud, almost immediately made out of date by the end of the Soviet Union the next year. The principal actors do pretty well with their spiralling animosity, the plot rather silly and the drama of the setting both understated and has had it’s teeth drawn.

Watch This: Middle-aged men try to re-capture their youth
Don’t Watch This: Dangerous games that gets people killed

10. Mary Poppins

Jane and Michael Banks, the children of Winifred and George Banks, have run away for the fourth time so their childminder Katie Nanna quits. Winifred is out all day at Suffragette rallies, George working at a bank. They decide to hire a new nanny. George Banks wants everything on time and in order (even more so than the Admiral at the end of the street who fires time guns and watches the weather). The children have their own opinion and write their own list of requirements; George throws this in the fireplace but it goes up and delivers itself to Mary Poppins. The next day the wind blows away the other applicants and Mary Poppins becomes the new nanny.

Mary Poppins is firm, and kind, and has magic and sings a lot. She has a friend Bert, who does a variety of jobs throughout the film; one man band, street artist and chimney sweep amongst them, and he joins them on many of the adventures they go on. Firstly they enter one of Bert’s street drawings, where they find themselves in an animated cartoon countryside. Another day they visit Uncle Albert who starts flying when he laughs, the party ending up having a tea party in the rafters. When Mary convinces George to take the children to his work Michael causes a run on the bank; fleeing they meet Bert and discover the secret world of chimney sweeps (singing and dancing on rooftops).

This eventually convinces Winifred and George that their children are more important than their other concerns (banking and votes for women). Mary Poppins is able to leave with a job well done.

On re-watching for the first time in many years, it’s a very slight story, though still a lot of fun. There’s a lot more George Banks learning to pay attention to his family and be less strict than I’d remembered. Each of the fantastic segments goes on really quite a long time. Children in the 60s would sit for it because there wasn’t anything else, or more interesting for them. I don’t know that animated penguins serving tea is all that amusing, or chairs and tables on wires, and they do go on.

Watch This: Fun children’s film
Don’t Watch This: Slow story that goes into song and dance diversions and has a trite moral